The drama at Reddit sure hasn't hurt traffic

Reddit
mascots are displayed at the company's headquarters in San
Francisco, California April 15, 2014.Reuters

July was a record month for link sharing and community site
Reddit, with a record 8 billion pageviews and 195 million
monthly visitors, according to the site's own public-facing
stats.

Reddit had a tough July. After a popular employee was apparently
fired, users revolted. The backlash eventually led CEO
Ellen Pao to step down, and she was replaced by Reddit
founder Steve Huffman — who almost immediately
proposed a set of controversial rules to help police the
site.

It was a lot of drama. But in the wake of all of that,
Reddit has never been more popular.

In May, Reddit had 175 million unique visitors. In June, it had
177 million unique visitors. That means that with July's 195
million figure, Reddit is growing almost nine times faster than
it was before the drama, as
TechCrunch points out.

It's a counterpoint to the notion that competing sites,
primarily
Voat, are eating Reddit's readership.

Still, it's possible that a lot of those new readers and visitors
just wanted to see what was going on during the ongoing
controversy. The real test, for Reddit as both a community and an
advertising-based business, will be if they stay around.